this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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Solarpunk technology
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Technology for a Solar-Punk future.
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Solarpunk is not about switching to a scrappy medieval lifestyle, it is about building a sustainable comfortable future.
Why do so many people always assume that energy uses are necessarily unsustainable or scarce? It is the first part of "SOLARpunk". You can have renewable and abundant energy.
It's not an assumption, it's a calculation. There's no way you can use the same amount of energy with solar and wind as you can with fossil fuels and nuclear. Cutting use is the thing. Anyone who's looked at the numbers of the energy budget is forced to conclude this.
Show me the calculation then. To me it is clear that we are heading towards 100% renewables now that batteries have reached prices that makes intermittence a solvable problem.
To me the switch to renewable, on the contrary, will remove many scarcity constraints from energy production. We will have peak production times where energy will have a negative cost. This will radically change the way we think about energy consumption.
Renewables keep reaching "impossible" milestones. Recently in many places, including places in the US, renewables surpass coal so to create an "impossible" milestone you need to separate wind and solar from other renewables and lump together fossils and nuclear (which is not a problematic source for the climate)
I mean, can you imagine telling people 15 years ago that even Texas, despite its toxic mentality of coupling fossil fuels and masculinity would produce more wind energy than coal energy by 2024? The trend is clear, the impossible thresholds are met one after the other and without electricity production dropping.